Cab 47 Recap

Season 47 of the Yale Cabaret has ended its run as of April 25th, which must mean it's time for a re-cap of the season. A re-cap wherein I try to recall and celebrate my favorite contributions to the magical basement that is the Yale Cabaret. Ready? Here are a baker's dozen of categories with my five exemplars in each (in chronological order, but for my fave pick), for a total of 65 citations: New Play: This year’s top five never-before-seen, new plays were: Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time, in which Alice in Wonderland—or rather Liddy in Wonderland—meets “Little Miss” beauty pageants, written with verve for a cast of crazies by Emily Zemba; The Zero Scenario, in which every Cleveland in these United States is threatened by the Ticks of Death but for a special plucky band of heroes, written by Ryan Campbell; The Untitled Project, in which a collective of black male YSD’ers create self-portraits in the context of racial profiling, conceived and directed by Ato Blankson-Wood and created by the ensemble; Sister Sandman Please, in which three sisters put it out there for a cowboy, with varying degrees of passion, irony and intention, written by Jessica Rizzo; and ... 50:13, in which an incarcerated black man about to be freed tries to tell it like it is, with candor, wit and a variety of character sketches, to a young prison-mate, written by Jiréh Breon Holder.

Adapted Play: Impressive pre-existing plays adapted for Cab 47 included four translations and an English-language opera: Don’t Be Too Surprised, written by Geun-Hyung Park, translated and directed by Kee-Yoon Nahm, lets us know in no uncertain terms that familial dysfunction can still take surprising forms on stage; MuZeum, translated and directed by Ankur Sharma, tells stories from ancient sources and contemporary headlines, to dramatize powerfully the victimization of women; Quartet by Heinrich Müller, translated by Doug Langworthy, directed by David Bruin, revisits Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons as a wickedly entertaining pas de deux and psychologically fraught cat-and-mouse; The Medium, an opera by Gian Carlo Menotti, directed by Ahn Lê, creates a world of mystery, loss, and deep feeling and gives further credence to the notion that opera is not just for opera houses; and ... Leonce and Lena by Georg Büchner, translated by Gavin Whitehead, directed by Gavin Whitehead and Elizabeth Dinkova, presents a play of aristocratic ennui that torches the well-made play, and this time with puppets!

Set Design: After all, the Cab is a basement with a kitchen, and convincing us we’re in a new space each week takes some doing. Here are some set designs that went beyond all expectation in their achieved artistry: Kurtis Boetcher’s set for Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time made a door where there’s a window and had the coloring and style of a child’s playhouse; Joey Moro’s versatile set for Hotel Nepenthe breathed a seedy charm, like we imagine Hotel Duncan does, or should; Chika Shimuzi and Izmir Ickbal’s stunning set for MuZeum lent aura aplenty and eye-catching beauty to its revue-style presentation; Christopher Thompson’s set for The Zero Scenario seemed to defy space itself in cramming so much busy-ness into the Cab, including a motelroom and a hidden headquarters, and ... Adrian Martinez Frausto’s moody set for The Medium was so fully achieved in its seedy gentility it might be a film set inviting a camera’s scrutiny.

Costumes: Dressing actors for their parts often goes beyond the norm, creating inspired additions to the visual flair of a show. Some of the tops in costumes were: Grier Coleman’s range of captivating dress for ancient characters of India and contemporary folks in MuZeum; Fabian Aguilar and Alexae Visel’s super cool get-ups for the agents protecting us from Tick Apocalypse in The Zero Scenario; Alexae Visel’s authentic mock-ups of the cartoonish costumes of the old Batman series “fit just like my glove” in Episode 21: Catfight; Haydee Zelideth had a field day with modernist Enlightenment-era costuming in Leonce and Lena; and ... Soule Golden and Montana Blanco rendered camp versions of the White Rabbit, Hatter, White Queen, and Tweedledum/dee we won’t soon forget in Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time.

Lighting: It doesn’t just help us see, it also selects and shows and evokes, sometimes making for quite magical effects. Illuminating dancers with lights that added to both movement and music in Solo Bach: Caitlin Smith Rapoport; creating a wealth of visual effects that kept us entranced in MuZeum: Joey Moro; putting on a show and putting-on the trappings of a storybook world in Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time: Joey Moro; using light to complement stories and to add drama in 50:13: Elizabeth Mak; and ... creating an Old World atmosphere both spooky and authentic in The Medium: Andrew Griffin.

Sound: It can be used in striking or surprising ways, or to create an aural texture to accompany the action. Creating a wintery world with bursts of music and broadcasts in Rose and the Rime: Jon Roberts, Joel Abbott; maintaining a sustained eerieness and B-movie aura in Hotel Nepenthe: Sinan Zafar; incorporating music and a range of emotional tones in MuZeum: Tyler Kieffer; bringing together recorded voice, spoken voice, and background music into a collage in The Untitled Project: Tyler Kieffer; and ... merging voices, sound effects, loops and his own music to create a shifting aural space in Sister Sandman Please: Chris Ross-Ewart.

Music and Movement: We don’t always get both, but it can make for entrancing theater when we do: MuZeum featured essential music by Anita Shastri, played on stage by a crew of musicians/actors and interacted with by the actors; The Untitled Project used recorded music tellingly and featured a show-stopping dance sequence by Ato Blankson-Wood; The Medium presented a stirring reduction of Menotti’s score into a solo piano tour de force by Jill Brunelle, expressive miming from José Ramón Sabín Lestayo, and impressive vocals from the cast; Sister Sandman Please benefited from Chris Ross-Ewart’s compositions amidst the aural textures, and delighted with a raucous “O Holy Night” from Ashley Chang; and ... Solo Bach showcased Zou Yu’s amazing solo violin performances, combined with the inventive, cryptic and dramatic choreography by Shayna Keller and her actor/dancers: Paul Cooper, Chalia La Tour, Julian Elijah Martinez, Leora Morris.

Special Effects: An ad hoc category that includes whatever doesn’t fit into other categories, such as: the combination of lights and star chart backdrop to create a sense of wonder in Touch: Joey Moro; the evocative projections-as-scenery in Solo Bach: Rasean Davonte Johnson; the B-movie monster ticks and blood and projections and other effects in The Zero Scenario: Rasean Davonte Johnson, Mike Paddock; the varied creepy puppets, hand-held and string-operated, in Leonce and Lena: Emily Baldasarra; and ... the use of projections and clips to tell stories and create context with images in The Untitled Project: Rasean Davonte Johnson.

Acting (ensemble): Ideally, the acting in a play is a group affair, in which everyone plays a part, of course. Still, it’s worth remarking on when a cast is more than the sum of its parts, as in these shows: Look Up, Speak Nicely and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time, the big kick-off extravaganza of the season featured a gallery of colorful characters by Sarah Williams, Celeste Arias, Aubie Merrylees, Shaunette Renée Wilson, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Melanie Field, Andrej Visky, Libby Peterson; The Zero Scenario, the crowd-pleasing first semester closer, pulled out all the stops with Ariana Venturi, Tom Pecinka, Sara Holdren, Ankur Sharma, Aaron Profumo, Emily Zemba, Ryan Campbell; The Untitled Project, an ensemble-derived show that focused on the subtle distinctions and broad stereotypes of race, was created and enacted by Taylor Barfield, Ato Blankson-Wood, Cornelius Davidson, Leland Fowler, Jiréh Breon Holder, Phillip Howze, Galen Kane; Leonce and Lena, in which actors and puppet-handler/actors interacted to create a zany theatrical world of kingdoms and encounters, with Sebastian Arboleda, Juliana Canfield, David Clauson, Anna Crivelli, Ricardo Dávila, Edmund Donovan, Josh Goulding, Steven C. Koernig, Lynda A.H. Paul, Nahuel Telleria; and ... Hotel Nepenthe, a comic tour de force of changing roles, repeating characters, and linked situations that ran from the creepy to the farcical, all created with manic intensity by Bradley James Tejeda, Annelise Lawson, Emily Reeder, Galen Kane.

Acting (individual): For individual performances, I’m going with some standouts, whether in accomplished ensemble work, or showcased in two-handers, or in the unrelenting spotlight of the solo show. Ladies first: Celeste Arias, hilarious as an unhinged mommie dearest in Look Up, Speak Nicely and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time; Sydney Lemmon, riveting as Mme Merteuil but even more so as Mme Merteuil/Valmont in Quartet; Maura Hooper, chameleonic as a series of characters, including a disaffected nun and a happy hooker, in Shiny Objects; Zenzi Williams, demonstrating a range of attitudes in four characters, from spiritual to demur to quietly confident in Shiny Objects, and ... Tiffany Mack, unforgettable as a heart-wrenching victim of an acid attack in MuZeum.

Acting (individual): And from the men: Jonathan Majors, finding himself in an unbearable situation and quietly going to pieces in Touch; Tom Pecinka as a highly verbal passenger monologuing his anxiety in The Zero Scenario; Edmund Donovan, riveting as Valmont but even more so as Valmont/Mme de Tourvel in Quartet; Ricardo Dávila as the slippery, caustic and fascinating Valerio in Leonce and Lena; and ... Leland Fowler as a stand-up guy feeling the longings of the jailed and acting out a quick lesson in family history and racism in 50:13.

Directing: For the vision behind the whole shebang that makes it all hang together, we celebrate directors: for the all-out campy and creepy charm of Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time: Ato Blankson-Wood; for keeping the hopscotch logic and many shifts in tone of Hotel Nepenthe on point: Rachel Carpman; for creating the interplay of stories, including humor, confrontation, and violence in MuZeum: Ankur Sharma; for showing a dramatic and thoughtful grasp of the resilience of a human spirit trapped in a cage in 50:13: Jonathan Majors; and ... for providing the comic highpoint of the season with wild charm, horror surprises and relentless verve in The Zero Scenario: Sara Holdren.

Production: From the above, it’s obvious which shows seemed tops to me, but to bring them all together for a final nod: Hotel Nepenthe, Sarah Williams, producer, Taylor Barfield, dramaturg, Avery Trunko, stage manager, the kind of shifting and surprising show that keeps me coming back to theater; MuZeum, Anita Shastri, producer, Maria Ines Marques, dramaturg, Emily DeNardo, stage manager, a strong and cathartic import to our shores; The Zero Scenario, Ahn Lê, producer, Helen Jaksch and Nahuel Telleria, dramaturgs, Anita Shastri, stage manager, a crazy sci-fi ride that screams “sequel!”; 50:13, Jason Najjoum, producer, Taylor Barfield, dramaturg, Lauren E. Banks, stage manager, an important and meaningful addition to the one-person play and the "black lives matter" movement; and ... Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time, Kelly Kerwin, producer, Nahuel Telleria, dramaturg, Avery Trunko stage manager, “the gang’s all here” type of theater, presenting a lively riff on the rigors of growing up female in our media-ized Wonderland.

Thanks again to our hosts for 18 weekends—plus a Drag Show: Molly Hennighausen, Will Rucker, Tyler Kieffer, and Hugh Farrell. And ... see you next season, at the Cab!

The Yale Cabaret Season 47 September 18, 2014-April 25, 2015

Country Living

Review of the Yale School of Drama’s The Seagull

Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull is a very busy play, a fact that the current production from the Yale School of Drama, directed by third-year director Jessica Holt, fully embraces. Begin with that very busy set (Jean Kim) running the entire length of the Iseman Theater’s space and including a balcony perch for the musicians who accompany the action with songs. There are chairs, tables, divans, garden seats, trees, paintings, musical instruments, a wooden cut-out of a half-moon, a huge painting of a lake on a curtain, various bric-a-brac, and, at both stage left and right, make-up tables with lighted mirrors—and don’t forget the swing built for two. The Seagull features theater as a theme because two of its main characters, Irina Nikolayevna Arkadina (Maura Hooper) and her son Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplev (Christopher Geary), are involved in theater—she as a respected actress, he as a fledgling (when the show begins) playwright. Holt’s production makes theatricality not only a theme but a modus operandi, finding, more than many productions do, in its sense of theater the comic excess of the play.

Granted, Chekhov called his play a comedy, but that fact seems to elude the general approach to The Seagull, as there are few jokes per se and Chekhov isn’t one to stage-direct farce and slapstick. Holt and company find the comedy by playing many of the interactions broadly and by minimizing the pathos—until, in the final of four acts, it seemingly can’t be helped. Even then, the use of a surprising exit underscores not only the staging, but the staginess of floundering actress Nina (Chasten Harmon)’s bid for profundity. In other words, this version of The Seagull keeps its eye on what makes all these characters laughable to us, but so unamusing to themselves, most of the time.

Consider some of the great casting choices: with Maura Hooper as Irina, there’s no way this production isn’t going to register fully, for our enjoyment, the staginess and vanity of a “great actress,” mouldering away at her brother’s country estate and trying—more deliberately than desperately—to maintain the erotic ardor of her lover while also trying—more casually than carefully—to be a mother to her earnest young son. Hooper has great comic gifts and her Irina, fully convinced that it’s all her show, doesn’t need to “steal” what she so clearly dominates, even without a sexual tryst on a tabletop. As her self-involved lover, the successful (careerist) writer Trigorin, Aaron Bartz sports an impressive wavy forelock and a dapper appearance. He’s quite the coxcomb and, at 55, is still able to have his head turned by Nina’s eager neediness. She so very clearly wants a man of substance like Trigorin and not a headstrong mama’s boy like Konstantin.

As the play’s hero, Geary has a voice that can ignite wood and chop ice. He can be Irina’s pathetic plaything one moment and upbraid her with his deep dissatisfactions the next. He begins earnestly artistic, rebellious against his mother’s generation, and ends surfeited with success but still hungry for what he pined for in youth. He’s a very Russian character, and Geary in particular and the show in general can turn on a dime from slapstick to existential bathos. That skill is nowhere more necessary than in the depiction of Nina, who in Harmon’s rendering goes from radiant, girlish vitality, to worn and disillusioned but also more profound. Her final scene with Konstantin is almost tragic because of their inability to find a shared note to end on. This, we might feel, could also be comic, but Holt’s Seagull takes Nina’s suffering seriously, and Harmon makes us believe in her, at least as much as Konstantin does.

In the end this Seagull is moving—but from the start it moves (the show boasts one of the quicker-seeming first acts I’ve seen at a School of Drama production), and for that to happen you need a lot of capable support to let us in on the lives of the other characters (seven speaking roles) without letting the play get bogged down. It helps to have the likes of Niall Powderly and Shaunette Renée Wilson as the couple Ilya and Paulina Shamrayev, who swell scenes and provide important reactions and, in llya’s case, oddly obsessive tensions. And Paulina provides as well a sullen dalliance for Yevgeny Sergeyevich Dorn (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a country doctor who abounds in feminine interest, and comes across as a likeable observer. In the key role of Masha, the Shamrayev’s airy daughter, Zenzi Williams prisses and preens and shares a charming drinking scene with Trigorin; suffering from Konstantin’s indifference, she marries the earnest school teacher Medvedenko (Andrew Burnap, who also provides some very effective accompaniment on the trumpet), who appears here to have more sense and self-respect than most of these gum-flapping eccentrics. Not least of which is the estate’s owner Pyotr Nikolayevich Sorin (Jonathan Majors), played as a fond, retiring, frail character who, like so many Chekhov characters, means well but achieves nothing. Add as well the servant Yakov (Luke Harlan, leading the other domestics—The Cook (Jennifer Schmidt) and The Maid (Pornchanok Kanchanabanca)—in musical interludes), who maintains the kind of unschooled, fierce intelligence that Russian writers like to ascribe to the serfs.

All in all, a game cast and a very physical, energetic, and enjoyable production. As generally happens in such large-scale plays, we do tend to miss the more engaging characters when they’re offstage, but at least Holt and company’s Seagull gives all the characters lots of room to move about in and lots of variety. Costumes (Asa Benally) run from Masha’s insistent black to Irina’s blazing red taffeta and her eye-popping red violet travel outfit, and include as well the requisite “simple peasant” gear and the traditional “Fiddler on the Roof” style that makes a caricature of Ilya, as well as handsome outfits that make us believe Paulina could turn the dandyish doctor’s head. Clothes make the man, and Konstantin’s final get-up reeks of self-importance, Hamlet-style. Elizabeth Mak’s lighting provides effects that alter time of day, inside/outside, and, in the final act especially, a claustrophobic change of mood, while Kate Marvin’s sound adds, among other things, the rain and a gunshot that will make you jump.

Long and involved The Seagull is, there’s no argument there. The School of Drama production throws as much energy, high spirits and variety at the classic text as one can imagine, finding the entertainment in all that existential ennui. Inspiring.

The Seagull By Anton Chekhov

Translated by Paul Schmidt

Directed by Jessica Holt

Scenic Designer: Jean Kim; Costume Designer: Asa Benally; Lighting Designer: Elizabeth Mak; Sound Designer: Kate Marvin; Production Dramaturg: Kelly Kerwin; Stage Manager: Kelly Montgomery

Yale School of Drama

December 12-18, 2014

Mommie Dearest

The Yale Cabaret is back, kicking off their new season this weekend with Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time, a new play by Emily Zemba, third-year playwright in YSD, and directed by Ato Blankson-Wood, a third-year actor. The play places Liddy (Sarah Williams)—younger sister of Alice (Libby Peterson)—in the snares of a beauty pageant for children when her older sister, according to their mother (Celeste Arias), fell down a hole and “isn’t coming back.” Liddy, with misgivings, is game—anything to please Mom. The majority of the play depicts for her, and us, just what she has let herself in for.

It’s campy, zany fun rife with cultural references that zing and swirl as we, with Liddy, try to get our bearings. We (I’m assuming) have the benefit of knowing something about Alice in Wonderland, so we’re not as out of our depth as Liddy is when confronting new characterizations of Lewis Carroll’s characters: Aubie Merrylees’ White Rabbit is hilariously manic with verbal tics, odd voices—some reminiscent of Jeremy in Yellow Submarine (Merrylees speaks to an invisible “Jeremy” over his headset)—and a cute little cottontail on his white hot-pants; Shaunette Reneé Wilson’s Tweddle-dee/dum is an aggressive schizo who has maybe been in just a few too many pageants; Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s MC Hattah looks like he could be Captain Hook and moves like he wants to be James Brown, and also manifests as a preacher and as a creepy befriender to befuddled Liddy; Andrej Visky’s Caterpillar Custodian does a softshoe mime routine with a broom (reminding me of the Lorenzo TV show but there’s no way this cast could know that, is there?)—and actually tries to be helpful, in a “there’s no place like home” fashion, to Liddy. Then there’s Mom as a Red Queen who has a few schizoid tendencies herself, one minute a beseeching Blanche Dubois, the next ready to belt like Ethel Merman as Gypsy Rose Lee, all while remaining a Southern Lady who only wants—desperately—what’s best for her beloved daughter—and the higher the heels, the better. And as the White Queen Melanie Field preens and pouts, representing the truly psychotic aspect of these mothers living vicariously through the cosmeticized beauty and poise of their little pre-teens. Or even pre-double digits. Oddly, the parts of the sisters seem a bit underwritten, with Williams suitably childish and Peterson a bit peremptory (as perhaps only older siblings can be). Her little aria about the demonic qualities of the looking-glass are accompanied by a very suitable soundtrack.

The set is a minor miracle in its own right as it creates a stage door where there is no door. The layout of the Cab generally only affords two exits/entrances—both of which are also fire exits—but Kurt Boetcher’s set for Look Up… has the cast coming in and out through a great curtained area at one end as well as a cartoonish set of stairs that takes them in and out of what is actually a window. Though I’m familiar with the Cab layout, it took some time for that fact to sink in. That’s part of the charm of the topsy-turvy world of Look Up… and costumes that combine the talents of Soule Golden and Montana Blanco will keep you entertained.

But it’s not all for laughs. The cult of glam and youth that causes mothers to make dress-up dolls of their children is in poor taste, if nothing else, and Zemba’s play is at its most barbed in depicting the toxic relation between these Queen Mothers and their hapless offspring; the more baleful side—wherein pre-pubscent girls are tricked out as miniature Lolitas—is underscored by the creatures of Lewis Carroll’s imaginary: Carroll, in his own person as Charles Dodgson, has been presumed by some a borderline pedophile with a penchant for pretty little girls—such as 11-year-old Alice Liddell, the model for his fictional Alice. MC Hattah’s brief “Billy Jean” inspired moonwalk might put us in mind of other “harmless” friendships between those too young to consent and those old enough to know better.

Yet it would be wrong to see the play as polemical or predominantly satirical. It’s primarily a fantasia, much as Carroll’s endlessly entertaining Alice books are, and that means an occasion to indulge imaginative sallies about childhood, motherhood, dressing up (in all it’s theatrical aspects, including drag), playacting, and those mysterious “judges” out there in the shadowy areas off-stage who ultimately determine who wins and who loses in show-biz.

Look Up, Speak Nicely, and Don’t Twiddle Your Fingers All the Time Written by Emily Zemba Directed by Ato Blankson-Wood

Dramaturg: Nahuel Telleria; Set: Kurt Boetcher; Lights: Joey Moro; Sound: Kate Marvin; Costumes: Soule Golden, Montana Blanco; Projections: Kristen Ferguson; Stage Manager: Avery Trunko; Producer: Kelly Kerwin

Yale Cabaret September 18-20, 2014

Ordeal

Since the start of the current semester, the Yale Cabaret has been on a roll. Each week has given audiences another provocative offering. This weekend the play is Yaël Farber’s He Left Quietly, which dramatizes the ordeal of Duma Kumalo, an inmate condemned to death row in apartheid South Africa for an act of mob violence in which he did not participate. Rather, he was arrested and condemned for political rather than criminal reasons. Kumalo served three years, awaiting death and enduring the dehumanizing and humiliating treatment of his captors, only to be reprieved, due to public pressure, from hanging (he had already been measured for the noose and his coffin) less than 24 hours before his time. After another four years he was released, only to experience the stigma of being a former prisoner who was never cleared of the crime. As originally staged, from 2002 until Kumalo’s death in 2006, He Left Quietly featured Kumalo himself. The play was produced as a docu-drama, with Kumalo telling his own scripted story while a professional actor would play “Young Duma,” acting out, mostly in mime, the events Kumalo describes, and a female actor would play “Woman”—a part that at times represents Farber herself, at other times the agents of the government, or a narrative voice. As staged at the Cabaret, directed by Leora Morris, all three parts are played by second-year actors at YSD.

Playing Duma, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II creates a sense of a man who has come through a harrowing ordeal both wiser and humbler. He begins by asking “how many times can a man die” and when the actual moment of death occurs. The main thrust of the show is not, as we might assume, indignity and political outrage, but rather the kind of insight that comes from having faced death and lived. In presenting his experiences as theater, Duma seems to have gained a philosophical detachment that makes him a benign narrative presence recounting what comes to seem a ritual cleansing: stripping away the accoutrements of the everyday—a scene in which Young Duma buys a pair of stylish shoes that, unknown to him at the time, he would wear only once: to be sentenced to death, establishes an “all is vanity” tone that Duma chuckles about; then the humiliations—such as a prison uniform deliberately too small—and the existential reminders, as current inmates wear the uniforms and sleep in the bedclothes, unlaundered, of those already killed; finally, the surrendering even of one’s attachment to life, as Duma says his goodbyes to his father and other loved ones and accepts the unique date with death we all inevitably face. The reprieve comes as almost a taunt, a way of showing that he is indeed a puppet on the strings of the State. Abdul-Mateen maintains such a dignified and knowing air that we see not a man consumed by suffering but rather one ennobled by it.

On a plain wooden stage set with a couple chairs, a primitive toilet, and a pile of shoes, backed with a chain-link face, He Left Quietly makes the most of its ritualistic overtones, even as it gives full drama to Duma’s individual plight. Enacting the range of emotions Duma endures—such as rage at his former lover, wracking sobs at his own fate, and, very movingly, teary solidarity in song for Lucky, a comrade gone to the gallows—Ato Blankson-Wood continues to impress viewers. The final tableau of Blankson-Wood silhouetted against the wall/fence, looking off, acts as a comment on the entire story of Kumalo, as a man who, once imprisoned unjustly then returned to the world of apartheid, must endure years under the shadow of the system that condemned him, while eventually taking control of his story as a tale to be told, and enacted again and again, for audiences. Without Kumalo’s own presence in the play, the play becomes more theater than document, so that we may find in it, as with any play, meanings that go beyond the actual events of Kumalo’s life.

From that point of view, the weakest aspect of the play is the role of Woman. Maura Hooper does a bravura job of playing sympathetic witness, indifferent judge, and other roles, but the part as written comes to seem a bit too contrived, a theatrical touch rather than a direct reflection of Kumalo’s experience—which is never true of Duma’s descriptions or Young Duma’s enactments.

Stark, unsettling, but ultimately redemptive, He Left Quietly makes its audience bear witness to the many unsung songs of political prisoners and unjust executions in our world. It is to Farber and Kumalo’s credit that they can convey both the extraordinary circumstances of Kumalo’s story as well as the more general existential condition we all face, and, most tellingly, the very real threat of political reprisals by the state’s arbitrary violence—never more fearsome and pitiless than when sanctioned by the law of the land.

He Left Quietly By Yaël Farber Directed by Leora Morris

Dramaturg: David Clauson; Set: Christopher Thompson; Lights: Andrew Griffin; Sound: Kate Marvin; Costumes: Fabian Aguilar; Projections: Reid Thompson; Technical Director: Mitchell Cramond, Mitch Massaro; Stage Manager: Sonja Thorson; Producer: Libby Peterson

Yale Cabaret February 27-March 1, 2014

Back to the CAB

Last weekend the Yale Cabaret offered its second-ever Yale School of Drag—memorable for many things, including Lupita Nyong’o drag, but if you missed it, then you missed it. And if you saw it, far be it from me to tell you what you saw. This week the Cab is back with the first of the eight shows that continue the second part of the 2013-14 Season. Artistic Directors Whitney Dibo, Lauren Dubowski, and Kelly Kerwin have arrived at an interesting mix of shows. Five are pre-existing plays, two are never-before-seen productions, and one is a mixture: a devised setting for known pieces (a bit like Radio Show in the fall).

The first three shows are scheduled beginning this week and for the next two weeks, then a two-week break, three more shows, a week dark, and then the final two. Got it? Here’s what’s coming:

Cab 11 is The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs, proposed by 2nd-year Set Designer Adrian Frausto (whose excellent work on Hedda Gabler closed recently) and directed by 3rd-year Director Cole Lewis, whose varied and unsettling thesis show The Visit was offered in the fall. The play, running for the Valentine's Day weekend, looks at the darker side of romance with a revisiting of the Bluebeard tale of the wealthy man who marries a woman and gives her everything, except . . . she can’t go into that room at the top of the stairs. If your Valentine is the kind who loves a good scare, then this is the place to be. And when was the last time the Cab offered a thriller based on tension and suspense? Written by Canadian playwright Carole Fréchette, the play, Dibo promises, will offer an unusual configuration of the Cab playing space and, with its theme of trust in romance, is perhaps all-too apropos for Valentine’s Day. February 13-15

Next comes Jean Genet’s psychological drama The Maids, proposed by 3rd-year Director Dustin Wills, Co-Artistic Director of Yale Summer Cabaret 2013, whose startlingly unusual Peter Pan played in December. The play, which usually takes place among three women—the mistress and her two maids—will be played by three males, “performing rituals of gender,” according to Dubowski, within a staged space constructed by Kate Noll with sound design by Tyler Kieffer. The idea is to present us with a space full of mirrors and different lines of sight so that the audience is placed in the roles of voyeurs and eavesdroppers, spying on what the maids get-up to behind the scenes. Mainstays of the Summer Cab 2013, Mickey Theis and Chris Bannow, will be joined by first-year actor, Andrew Burnap. February 20-22

The third show before the break is He Left Quietly, proposed by 1st-year Director Leora Morris, a play by Yaël Farber about Duma Kumalo, a man sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit in apartheid South Africa. Kumalo’s story, which involves a stay-of-execution delivered on the day the death sentence was to be carried out, followed by another four years of incarceration for a total of 7 years in prison, is a story of a man’s spirit triumphing over unspeakable deprivations. The show, which features three 2nd-year actors, Ato Blankson-Wood, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and Maura Hooper, returns us to the dark realities of apartheid South Africa and a search for justice. February 27-March 1

After two dark weeks, the Cab will return with The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion, a partly devised piece proposed by 1st-year Dramaturg David Bruin. The show will transform the Cab into a Greenwich Village basement in the early 1960s where beatniks and bohemians gather to check out two one-acts by two of their own: Edward Albee and María Irene Fornés. The production takes us back to when these darlings of the theatrical world were still “up-and-coming” and where the surroundings for the play are part of the play in a time of porous conceptions of theater. March 20-22

Cab 15 is We Fight We Die by Long Island-born playwright Timothy J. Guillot and directed by 1st-year playwright Jiréh Breon Holder; the play looks at the fate of the work of graffiti artist Q in his tussle with City Hall, which aims to stamp out his form of art. With a Greek chorus rapping to us about the struggle and original works of art by MFA students in the Yale School of Art, the show provides an interesting collaboration between art forms and media that should be aurally and visually challenging, and, with the recent obliteration of 5Pointz in Long Island City, very timely. March 27-29

Next comes an unusual devised piece from 3rd-year actor and Co-Artistic Director of Summer Cabaret 2013, Chris Bannow. The source material: The Mystery Boy, Bannow’s sister’s original 126-page novel, written two years ago when she was 11. With 2nd-year dramaturg Helen Jaksch (seen in the fall as M in Crave) co-directing, the ensemble cast will be put through their paces with a love triangle, adventures involving the Mafia, vacation romance, and the various pleasures and perils of social media as the lingua franca of our current pre-teen world. April 3-5

2nd-year playwright Ryan Campbell—his Dead Ends was a studio play this past fall—offers his own A New Saint for a New World, directed by 2nd-year director Sara Holdren, who directed Tiny Boyfriend in the fall. The premise: Joan of Arc wants to return to earth; God finally agrees on the condition that she not start any wars or revolutions. Conceived as “a real big play for a small room,” Saint considers the possibilities for faith in 2014 NYC and the frustrations faced by a heroic crusader forbidden to crusade. April 17-19

Cab 18, the last of the season, might be a somewhat obvious choice: The Brothers Size by Tarell Alvin McCraney, the YSD graduate playwright who recently won a Yale Windham-Campbell Writing Prize and a MacArthur “genius” Award in the same year. Three 1st year actors, Jonathan Majors, Julian Elijah Martinez, and Galen Kane proposed the play, written while McCraney was a third-year at YSD, and made their case that it’s a play they have an urgent need to enact due to their personal histories and the unique opportunity offered by the Cab. Directed by Luke Harlan, the play is the story of two brothers—Ogun runs a car-repair shop, the other, Oshoozi, recently released from prison, comes to work for him—and a third man, Elegba, also come from jail, who visits to bring Oshoozi a gift. Set in the bayou country of Louisiana and involving music and African myths, the play should end the Cab’s 46th Season with a strong finish as YSD pays tribute to one of its own. April 24-26

So, that’s what you can look forward to in the weeks ahead. See you at the Cab!

Yale Cabaret 217 Park Street New Haven, CT

Season 46 Co-Artistic Directors: Whitney Dibo, Lauren Dubowski, Kelly Kerwin Managing Director: Shane Hudson

Classroom Self-Defense

The latest Yale Cabaret offering, The Defendant, addresses the quality of life of the underprivileged—in this case, students our educational system is failing. The play, by third-year YSD actress Elia Monte-Brown, is based on the playwright’s experiences as a teacher in the New York school system, a background that injects a realism into the play, even as the play moves a bit tendentiously from Welcome Back, Kotter-style classroom hi-jinx to something much more dramatic. The play begins with charges against “the defendant”—Idea (Chalia La Tour)—that almost drop into the background, but for dark reminders along the way that set-up the devastating finale. The cast, consisting of first year YSD students making their Cabaret debuts, fully enters into their roles of spirited youths trapped in a low expectation school, facing yet another substitute teacher. Serena (Melanie Field) is a bit out of her element in trying to fill in for a recently departed biology teacher—Mrs. Brown—who called one student a sociopath and then fled. But Serena has her heart in the right place and is struggling to do right by her charmingly dysfunctional charges.

Idea is the most promising student, a dynamo of personality who strives to over-achieve. As her boyfriend Ruben (Julian Elijah Martinez) reminds us, over-achieving is easy in a school that asks for little more than busy work, and yet Serena still hopes to affect the students’ futures. Her tirade when Idea is arrested for a provoked assault that ends in the death of Dean Knowls grips us with the anger that Monte-Brown infuses into the speech. Serena’s boyfriend, a lawyer (Aubie Merrylees), injects a sense of legal practicality into the scene, which lets the question of violence and retribution hang unresolved. We eventually see the scene in which the predatory Dean (Merrylees), demanding the favors Idea once gave, meets with death; her act of violence is set-up by several stories in which Idea, the victim of domestic rape early in her life, flips out to the shock of her peers.

Idea’s justification is clear enough, and the enormity of her act is tragic. This is what overwhelms Serena and Ruben, and plunges the other students into despondency. The situation is almost too much for the play to bear, as most of the time it is a comical exploration of classroom types. As directed by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, the play is very indulgent toward its actors: several are given brief monologues to introduce themselves and provide commentary on the other characters, creating moments of confidence with the audience that do much to make the characters likeable—particularly Jonathan Majors as Kyle, and Shaunette Renée Wilson as Idea’s BFF Diandra, and, very memorably, as Grandma Rose.

More context for the lives of the students would be welcome, as, collectively, they seem to be school-bound personalities even willing to come to class on a Saturday. Teaching biology quickly goes out the window, and Serena has them enacting plays, at some length, and parsing poems, but it’s the lessons that take place between the students that are more interesting—such as the sweetly teen-aged coupling of Idea and Ruben—and Monte-Brown’s ear for the street lingo of her characters provides both amusement and the kinds of wise asides that keep these kids interesting.

Seth Bodie’s set—created wholly of schoolroom chairs—is both sculptural and imposing, effectively lit by Joey Moro to give the whole a sense of a claustrophobic maze these students might never escape from, unless, as with Idea, it is into even more dire incarceration. Fast-moving and played with feeling, The Defendant works hard in a brief compass to amuse, inform and anger its audience, and mostly succeeds.

The Defendant By Elia Monte-Brown Directed by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II

Stage Manager: Carolynn Richer; Dramaturg: Taylor Barfield; Producer: Jabari Brisport; Set: Seth Bodie; Costumes: Montana Blanco; Sound: Tyler Kieffer; Lights: Joey Moro; Technical Director: Matt Groeneveld

Yale Cabaret January 23-25, 2014

What We Talk About When We Talk About Carver

Raymond Carver’s short story “Beginners” became his published short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” and therein lies a tale. The published title and story became “Carveresque” in the minds of his admirers, but it turned out that the title, and many other elements in the story, were due to the editorial efforts of Gordon Lish, a writer and editor who nurtured Carver as his mentor and publisher. Was Carver more “Carver” after Lish’s intervention or before? Whose story is it, anyway? This literary question seems to be the matter being dramatized in Phillip Howze’s Beginners by Raymond Carver; or, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love at Yale Cabaret, but, as might be expected, that story-behind-the-story is not so easy to dramatize.

Sitting before the audience are four people around a table, just like in both versions of Carver’s story: Mel/Herb (Aaron Bartz) and Terri (Prema Cruz) are a couple, as are Nick (David E. Bruin) and Laura (Ashley Chang). In the story these four get onto the subject of “love.” In Carver’s “Beginners,” Herb holds forth about his views more than the others, mostly in an effort to offset Terri’s claim that the abusive man, Carl, with whom she had lived before Herb and who eventually took his own life, loved her. “If that’s love, you can have it,” Herb says, more than once. In “What We Talk…” Herb is called Mel, and he says most of the same things. (You can know this by looking up the changed text—The New Yorker printed the original with Lish’s emendations some time after Carver’s death.)

On stage, we get a brief gesture to the name change and maybe the sense that we’re going to be watching an enactment that registers the alterations, so that “the story” will morph according to which version we’re getting. The problem with that approach is the changes are often too subtle to enact. So, Howze and director Andras Viski append to the story happening in front of us voice-overs from Carver’s letters to Lish, read by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, to give a sense of how the story got away from Carver. And yet nothing he says comments on any specific changes. We can only infer what Carver objects to, as he goes from gratefully “taking the changes” to questioning what Lish has done to his story.

As someone who both edits the writing of others and writes, I found this aspect of the play to be the most interesting. I could feel for Carver, and Abdul-Mateen reads the prose in a clear and forceful voice that lets us hear how carefully—and even desperately—Carver was choosing his words, trying to call off the editorial license he had called down upon his tale. But what about the story in front of us and the interplay?

The things Lish struck out of the story float at times behind the players as ghostly text, then as struck-through text. No one reads this text aloud—I suppose because it has been silenced by Lish—so if you read quickly you know what’s happening in “Beginners”; if you don’t you only get “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

The disparity is very important at the story’s close when Mel/Herb, now pretty drunk, starts to flounder around about calling his kids—from whom he is separated by his divorce from his first wife—and then goes off to take a shower before, ostensibly, the two couples go out to eat. In Carver’s original version, there is much more speech from Terri; in the Carver/Lish version, not. Both include the speech by Nick, looking out the window and away from the women—Laura comforting Terri, who is upset—, with which Howze’s play ends. It’s hard to say, at that point, what version of the story we’re getting. Neither Carver’s nor Carver/Lish’s because, most obviously, neither were written as a stage play.

So, what about Howze’s version? The best thing about the play version is Aaron Bartz’s reading of Mel/Herb. While he doesn’t “look” like I imagine a Carver character looking, he is closer to that image than the others and capably delivers the long speeches—particularly the story-within-the-story about the old couple hospitalized after an accident—that describe Mel/Herb’s view of what married love should be. The fact that neither of the couples is enjoying that kind of married love is clear, but, at the same time, we do experience the hopefulness of Laura—Ashley Chang makes the most of the reactions her character is there for—and the neutrality of Nick.

In the story, though, Nick is our narrator, so his neutrality is partly offset by the fact that we get everything through his perspective. Howze doesn’t let us in on that until Nick delivers the final statement of the play, and that has the effect of making his words sort of hang there, even more than they do in the short story.

As Terri, Prema Cruz’s role is crucial because, as the night goes on, we come to realize that much of Mel’s fulmination is directed at her previous love. Mel can forthrightly state that he now hates his former wife, while allowing he must’ve loved her at one time, but Terri’s silence on that point tells us that she won’t say she hates the at-times violent man she previously married. She still feels his love was love because she still loves him (she sat at his side until his death, three days after the self-inflicted gunshot that killed him), and that love makes her current husband increasingly surly. All this is dramatized quite well in Viski’s production, though Cruz seems too detached to be the kind of "open heart" I imagine Carver imagined Terri to be.

What is much more murky is what any of that has to do with the drama between Lish and Carver, and if we’re to read the lines that pass by us too quickly—as the figures at the table turn away from us to read the wall with us—as part of the play or not.

Howze and Viski’s version of the content of “Beginners/What We Talk About…” works because Carver’s story has enough verbal interaction to be stageable. The four-way conversation is interesting and Bartz engaging enough to carry the evening. But what doesn’t get across is the “Carver” element of story-telling: that rather laconic and undemonstrative narrative voice that floats ghostly behind-the-scenes, here, but which is the whole point, in narrative fiction. Instead, we get the drama of those letters, whose reality almost overwhelms the playlet before us. Which may be the point. Or not.

Beginners by Raymond Carver; or, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love Adapted by Phillip Howze Directed by Andras Viski

Dramaturg: Rachel Carpman; Producers: Emika Abe, Libby Peterson; Set Designer: Jean Kim; Costume Designer: Sara Holdren; Lighting Designer: Joey Moro; Sound Designer: Joel Abbott; Projections Consultant: Shawn Boyle; Projections Engineer: Joey Moro; Stage Manager: Kate Pincus; Technical Director: Ted Griffith; Photography: Nick Thigpen

Yale Cabaret October 17-19, 2013